100 Million Facebook users’ information published, ‘meh’ says Internet community

Now, THAT is how you get attention… A security consultant decided to execute some code, scan Facebook for publicly search-able profiles, and publish that information in a 2.8GB download via torrent at thepiratebay.org.  I don’t have first hand knowledge of what’s in the file, the download has about 40 minutes left before finishing.

In light of this, I have a question.  So what?

It’s not like this was some hack; he mined publicly available data.  All 100 million of these people had the opportunity to change their security settings if they didn’t want to be found.  Maybe, just maybe, they WANT to be found.

Isn’t it handy to search for long lost friends on facebook, and actually find them?  If people were unaware of how easy this was to do, hasn’t he done them a favor in pointing it out to them, so they can, again, go change their settings if they don’t like it?

From what I can tell, phone numbers and email addresses were left out.  It sounds like it’s just names, photos, and URLs of publicly search-able profiles.  It seems, also, that most people really don’t care.  Frankly, you can count me among them.  Should Facebook change the default security settings to lock people out, and make you opt in instead of opt out?  Probably.  Will they? Probably not, and everybody using the service is well aware of that fact.

I’ll let you know how much of your information is in this list, once it finishes the torrent.